


Real

by TheSigyn



Category: Torchwood
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-26
Updated: 2010-02-26
Packaged: 2018-04-15 13:09:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 14,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4607964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSigyn/pseuds/TheSigyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ianto has always liked to pretend that his relationship with Jack wasn't real. But when Jack comes back and asks him out on an official 'date', it's time to face reality. Even when neither of them are sure what it is. Immediately after Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang. Sections of The Year that Wasn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

  
“This is unreal!” Owyn snapped as they left the building. “Spending all day avoiding myself. Not my idea of fun.”   
  
“It shouldn’t be that hard,” Tosh said. “We should all be working. All we have to do is avoid the hub.”   
  
“But where’s the car?” Owyn snapped. “We get to walk home, and tomorrow, we get to walk here and retrieve it!”   
  
Owyn could grumble at a sunny day for making him pull out his sunglasses. Gwen’s response was more practical. “I guess this means I get the evening off.” She pulled out her cell phone. “Rhys? Yeah, I got time off. I know I just went in to work, but they sent me home. An hour?” She waved at Jack and Ianto as she headed toward the corner.   
  
Ianto looked over at Jack. Jack still looked a little stunned by John Hart’s last words. Captain John disturbed Ianto. He had reminded him of Jack, plus ten. Or minus several million, depending on which way you looked at it. “You think you’ll ever see him again?” he asked once everyone had scattered.   
  
“I hope not,” Jack said.   
  
Ianto raised an eyebrow, his hands deep in his pockets.   
  
“He brings up things I don’t want to think about,” Jack said. “I don’t like the man I was when I knew him. I...”   
  
“I understand,” Ianto said quietly.   
  
Jack looked over at Ianto. “So. Still up for that date?”  
  
Ianto looked like a rabbit in headlights. “Um,” he said.   
  
Jack looked down at his wrist strap. “According to this, in a little while I’ll have about forty minutes while the hub’s free to shower and change. After that, I’m homeless until we catch up to ourselves.” He looked Ianto up and down. “We could spend the time having dinner. Head to the cineplex.” He gave Ianto that devastating smile, but Ianto had been seeing something new in Jack’s eyes since he came back. Something dark and desperate and painful. “What do you say?” Those last words were very quiet.   
  
“I-I already said...” Ianto trailed off.   
  
“So... tonight then?”   
  
Ianto was having trouble finding his voice. “Y-yeah. Yeah. Okay.”   
  
Jack stated a time, and then took Ianto’s hand, very briefly in his. “Pick you up at your place,” he said, and left.  
  
Ianto’s hand felt very cold after Jack’s had left it. Ianto rubbed it. He couldn’t figure out what he was feeling. But the truth was, whatever it was, it was a damn sight better than he’d been feeling for the last six months.   



	2. Chapter 2

  
Jack showed up at Ianto’s flat promptly on time. He rang the doorbell. Ianto stood for a count of seven at the door before he decided to open it. Jack’s face lit up like a firework, and Ianto wasn’t sure why. Ianto had had no idea how to dress. Finally he’d just settled for his work clothes. It wasn’t as if Jack had any other expectations, right?   
  
Ianto had been buzzing, gently, since Jack had left him. He frequently found himself leaning against a wall or falling into a chair, rubbing his face and trying to figure out what he was about to do.  
  
Ianto always tried to pretend that what he had with Jack wasn’t real. That it wasn’t a relationship, possibly that none of it had ever happened. It was just some highly erotic dream they’d shared, late at night and secretly in disused corners of the hub. Love was real. Lisa, that had been real. This thing, whatever it was, with Jack? Not real at all.   
  
But going out on a date... did that make it real? Did that make it a relationship?   
  
Where the hell had Jack been? Why didn’t he tell them anything? Ianto had been quite convinced he would never see the man again, and had been trying to come to terms with that fact. It made Ianto’s life infinitely easier, but it also made him violently depressed. Scared and confused but happy was better than miserable, was it? But he was too confused to know if ‘happy’ could ever be part of the equation.   
  
When Ianto finally opened the door, Jack performed a preemptive strike and kissed his cheek the moment the door was fully open. Ianto was too surprised to make a move. “Hey,” Jack said. He held up a hand with a single rose in it. “I thought you might freak if I brought you anything more impressive.”   
  
Ianto blushed pink. Okay, things were officially going strange, now. He’d just been picked up by a man who brought him a flower. He felt like his sister.  
  
“You’ll have to forgive me,” Jack said. “It’s been like forty years since I’ve been on an actual ‘date’. I may be a little old fashioned.”   
  
Ianto’s blush deepened to red. “That’s okay,” he said.   
  
“I’ve got a reservation,” Jack said. “It’s just dinner. You can stop blushing, now.”   
  
Ianto turned positively maroon. He laughed nervously.   
  
Jack laughed with him. “Here,” Jack said. He took the rose, broke the end off, and inserted it carefully in Ianto’s lapel. “You look great.” His eyes flickered seductively over Ianto’s form. “‘Course, you always look great.”   
  
Ianto rubbed his face with embarrassment. He wondered if Jack was trying to get his cheeks to actually bleed. “I-I’ve got to warn you, this is... g-going to be a bit weird for me.”   
  
Jack nodded seriously. “I know that. Come on. I got a taxi.”   
  
They rode to the restaurant, an intimate little Italian place, where the lighting was dim and the music was subtle. Jack had reserved a corner seat, for which Ianto was grateful. He couldn’t concentrate on the food. I couldn’t figure out how he felt. He did notice, however, that Jack had ordered both the soup and the salad, as well as an appetizer, and seemed to be eating the entire meal with gusto.   
  
Jack asked questions about what he had missed. Ianto sipped white wine nervously and told him. An alien hoverbike had fallen through the rift a few weeks after Jack left, and they had a hell of a time wrestling it away from the twelve year old girl who had claimed it. There was a flyby Antarian scout ship, which was actually lost, but since their entire language structure was based on the rearrangement of prime numbers, it took a good twenty-seven hours before Tosh managed to work out what they wanted. They chased down an alien threat only to discover it was an older brother trying to drive his little sister mad. There was one interesting alien which actually had come through the Rift at six in the morning, undergoing labor, and Owyn and Gwen had to perform the delivery at the hub before it could go on its way back home.   
  
“Ianto,” Jack stopped him. “All you’re doing is talking about work.”   
  
Ianto paused, then swallowed the bite he had in his mouth. “I’m sorry,” he said evenly. “I don’t really know how to talk to you. All we ever talked about was work.”  
  
Jack looked down at his plate. “I know.” His eyes flickered back up at Ianto, and they were heavy with emotion. “And for that I’m sorry.”   
  
Ianto swallowed, and it had nothing to do with the food.   
  
“Do you want dessert?” Jack said quickly. “I need dessert. I have been quite literally dying for a tiramisu. Waiter!” He snapped his fingers and in the end couldn’t decide between the tiramisu and the black forest gateau, so he ordered both.   
  
“You’re eating too much,” Ianto said automatically.   
  
Jack opened his mouth to reply, then took a swallow of his beer instead. “I’m hungry,” he said. He looked away from Ianto into the corners of the restaurant, and that darkness came into his eyes again. There was something Jack wasn’t telling him.   
  
With a sudden insight, Ianto asked, “When was the last time you ate?”  
  
“You mean ‘food’?” A giddy, almost hysterical grin cut across Jack’s face. “I actually can’t remember,” he said flippantly, but Ianto suspected he was telling the truth.   
  
“What besides food?” Ianto asked quietly.   
  
Jack lifted his beer glass to toast the air. “Algae paste!” he said with mock glee. “Breakfast of champions.”   
  
“Where have you been?” Ianto asked again.   
  
“Doesn’t matter. Ah, thank you my friend! You’re a life saver!” Jack collected his delicacies from the waiter and groaned as the first bite of chocolate cake touched his tongue. “Mm!” he moaned. He heaved a contented sigh. “You have no idea.”   
  
The sounds Jack was making were distracting at best. Jack noticed that Ianto’s eyes were fixed on him, and he grinned. “You have to taste this.”  
  
“No, that’s okay,” Ianto began, but Jack lifted a forkful of black forest gateau and held it towards Ianto’s lips.   
  
“Taste this,” he insisted, and Ianto found himself opening his mouth. Jack inserted the fork into his mouth in an unmistakably sensual gesture. “Taste it, really taste it. Taste the flour tangled up with the chocolate. Taste the egg and the sugar and the vanilla, can you taste the vanilla?” He moaned again with enthusiasm, and Ianto found himself rolling the chocolate around his mouth. With Jack’s encouragement he could taste a dozen different flavors all tangled together to make this, freshly baked chocolate cake, a taste unlike anything else.   
  
He swallowed and stared at Jack. Jack wore a grin from ear to ear, and the darkness was completely banished from his eyes. “Now, isn’t that amazing?” he asked. “The single most decadent confection in the whole of creation.” He looked down at the tiramisu. “Except perhaps this.”   
  
Jack finished his dessert with attendant delight. Ianto found his mouth watering, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the confections, bites of which were continually stuffed into his mouth. He found he couldn’t refuse when Jack offered him bites of strawberry, sweetened whipped cream, delicate chiffon cake. Jack wasn’t feeding him dessert — he was feeding him his delight, and though Ianto wasn’t hungry, he really couldn’t say no.   
  
As they finished dinner, Jack grabbed the check, and then Ianto’s hand.   
  
“I don’t really know what’s playing,” Ianto said. He’d been lucky if he could find his shoes in the morning, let alone pay attention to the movie advertisements.   
  
“Forget the movie,” Jack said. “I want real life. Take a walk with me.”   
  
“Okay,” Ianto said. He felt very awkward walking in public with his hand in Jack’s, and the moment he could he quietly disengaged it. Jack didn’t seem to notice.   
  
Jack was babbling on about inconsequential nothings, really staring at the city streets around them. “Did you know they have a word for dessert on Strantagenous V? It translates as ‘deadly paradise’. Can you imagine, actually calling a course ‘deadly’? There was a story I heard, I don’t know if it’s true, but that in ancient times the desserts on Strantagenous V were actually all poisoned, to varying degrees. Only if you were willing to face the possibility of death were you permitted to taste the sweetness.”   
  
Jack continued riffing for a bit on eating traditions of various alien cultures, then suddenly he stopped dead. Since they were in the middle of a parking lot, Ianto couldn’t see why, and immediately thought it was a threat. He started glancing around him, searching for danger. “Look at that SKY!” Jack breathed.   
  
Ianto looked. There was a three quarter moon leaking quietly from behind some rather damp looking silver clouds. The lights of Cardiff defeated most of the stars, but a few of the bolder and more determined sequins were glinting through in patches. A few inches below the moon, an airplane crawled steadily to the west. Ianto couldn’t see anything particularly wondrous about it. “Yeah,” he said.   
  
Jack took a few delighted steps into the parking lot, his arms spread wide as if to embrace the whole world. “Listen to it, Ianto!” He grinned widely.   
  
Ianto listened. “The traffic?”  
  
“The traffic! The cars, the electricity running through all these wires. The huge pulse of life! The people talking and laughing. There’s a club down there, can you hear the music? It’s a WORLD! A living, breathing world! Listen to it all!” He laughed with giddy delight and looked back at Ianto.   
  
Ianto was standing in his typical mode, arms crossed, back straight as a rod, and he was sure the expression on his face was one of dim incredulity. So he wasn’t sure what it was that made Jack suddenly lunge toward him and kiss him so fiercely that his lips ached and the lights in the parking lot seemed to fade to black. Jack pulled away, and Ianto forced his eyes to open. “Dance with me!” Jack hissed, and he disengaged Ianto’s arms from each other and placed them on his on back.   
  
Ianto wasn’t much of a dancer, and he wasn’t at all sure which one of them was supposed to be leading, and he wasn’t certain he was ready to be dancing in a parking lot with another man, anyway, so it took them a little while to settle into any kind of rhythm. After a few fumbles Ianto began to laugh. It was all so silly! Jack laughed too, and a moment after they had actually coordinated their movements, Jack deftly twirled Ianto away from him. When he drew him back it was into a fierce hug. He held him tightly for a full minute. “Missed you!” he breathed into Ianto’s ear.   
  
Ianto’s heart thudded. How the hell could Jack do this to him all the time? What was it? It didn’t make Any Sense, how could a man who had never even glanced at another man in his life be made completely and totally weak in the knees by one handsome, terrifying rogue? “I missed you too,” he said, very much afraid that the truth of that statement would actually come through in his voice.   
  
Jack released him then, and stared into his face for so long that Ianto had to look away. The depth of that gaze was too deep, and Ianto was actually frightened. “Where have you been?” he asked again.   
  
“Nowhere,” Jack said. He touched Ianto’s cheek and then turned away, continuing their walk. Ianto took a deep breath before following him. Jack started up another running commentary on alien culture, and Ianto walked along beside him, his hands deep in his pockets. He was afraid to say anything at all. Things were churning deep inside him, and they frightened him more than he thought they should. Fortunately, Jack seemed willing to do the talking — even if it wasn’t really talking. Not about anything important.   
  
Finally, Jack stopped. “Well, this is it,” he said.   
  
Ianto looked up and realized they were standing by the steps outside his flat. “Oh,” he said. That meant the date was over then, right? A thousand different things started rushing through his head until his thoughts were nothing more than so much white noise. His ears were roaring with it.   
  
“So,” Jack said. “What did you think?”   
  
About the date. What did he think about the date. Ianto’s thoughts swirled until he could focus at least on the question. “Truthfully?” he said. “A bit awkward.”   
  
Jack laughed. “Yeah,” he said.   
  
Ianto swallowed. It wasn’t fair. How could a single laugh hold so much innuendo and promise? There was something deadly in Jack’s smile, that was it. It lit up his face, hid the darkness in his eyes. And it was while Ianto was thinking these thoughts that Jack, as nervously as if he was walking a teenage girl home from a date in nineteen-fifty, took hold of Ianto’s head and leaned toward him to kiss him.   
  
Ianto had already decided he wouldn’t let Jack kiss him in public. That idea went by the wayside instantly.   
  
Ianto thought it might be Jack’s hand on his jaw. That was Jack’s favorite way to kiss people, Ianto had realized. Holding their head so they couldn’t get away. Or so that the kiss became part of the whole of him, and not just his lips. Maybe it was Jack’s scent, which always drove Ianto to distraction. Maybe it was just starvation — Ianto had barely touched another human being in six months. Or maybe it was the same reason why his thoughts were nothing more than a blur of white noise. Whatever the reason, Ianto let him kiss him, and let him kiss him, and let him and let him and wouldn’t let him stop.   
  
Finally, his eyes hooded, unable to breathe, he let Jack pull away about a centimeter and ask, “You gonna let me come up?”  
  
“Oh, yeah,” Ianto’s voice answered before his mind had agreed to this plan.   
  
Jack chuckled and kissed him again, then helped him up the stairs. He actually had to help him — much to his chagrin, Ianto actually stumbled over his own feet. His entire body was humming, and he wasn’t sure his heart was beating so much as whirring inside him like a hummingbird’s wings. The roaring in his ears had gotten louder. The only sound he could hear, despite the shouting and the traffic and the city streets of Cardiff, was Jack’s breathing, Jack’s footsteps, the half concealed chuckles that were still buried in Jack’s throat. It was as if the world had vanished but for Jack.   
  
Ianto was trembling so hard he could barely pull his keys out of his pocket. This trouble was compounded by Jack, who kept kissing Ianto’s neck like some uncontrollable satyr. Ianto couldn’t get the key into the lock, and then finally dropped the wretched things. “You’ve got to stop that,” he breathed, but it didn’t sound like much of a protest.   
  
Jack turned him and kissed him soundly, pressing his body against the door. Ianto moaned, making tiny noises against Jack’s lips, and he could feel Jack’s body all along the line of him, pressing him, moving against him. Ianto was so hard by this time that what with the trembling and the hyperventilation he wasn’t sure he could still stand. Jack slowly lowered himself to his knees, which was enough to make Ianto pulse all over, as if he’d just been electrocuted, but all Jack did was retrieve the keys, reach around Ianto, and unlock the door. He did all of this without once turning away from him.   
  
Ianto fell inside as the door opened, quite unable to stand and act normally. It was worse than being drunk. And felt so much better than — anything. He didn’t follow that thought too deeply, because it involved too much, you know, thinking. And he was pretty much past thinking by this point.   
  
Jack caught him and held him as he closed the door behind him. Ianto found his arms going around Jack under his coat. He couldn’t stop kissing him, but even with his eyes closed and his neural processes shot, he still had the ability to pull Jack’s coat off him and leave it in a heap on the floor. At any other time, Ianto would be horrified. He loved that coat, and he was the one to iron it. But he was a little preoccupied.   
  
For his part, Jack had pulled Ianto’s shirt out from his waistband, and his hands were busily trying to drag Ianto, skin and all, inside his clothes. “Where’s the bedroom?” he whispered.   
  
There were words in that breath, Ianto was sure of it. One of them was important. Bedroom, that was it. “Ahm... it’s... ahm....” He managed to gesture with one thumb in the general direction. Jack pushed him bodily in that direction, and finally found the darkened room.   
  
At other times, Jack would have been able to note that the room was pristine. So pristine it almost looked as though Ianto didn’t live here at all. The bed was tightly made and there were no clothes other than neatly filed away in his closet. But Jack frankly didn’t care about that at this stage. All he cared about was that there was something warm and soft for lying on in the center of the room, and getting Ianto’s clothes off him as quickly as humanly possible.   
  
Those two goals were combined quickly as Jack finished fumbling the button on Ianto’s slacks and pulling them down. He pushed Ianto onto the bed, where he sat trembling, and pulled off the slacks, as well as Ianto’s shoes and socks, leaving him entirely nude from the waist down. Which was just how Jack liked it. He perched on the ground between Ianto’s knees and found the deeply engorged shaft that thrust itself at him.   
  
Ianto felt Jack’s warm breath on his cock and gasped. His hands wound themselves into his hair, and when Jack’s soft, hot tongue lapped at the tender cleft on the front of his shaft, he cried out. Oh, God, how he had missed this! “Jack!” he whispered.  
  
Jack realized this was not a time for subtlety. Ianto had, in fact, truly missed him. He wrapped his lips around his cock and sucked deeply and fully. Ianto’s hips shifted and his knees gripped Jack’s ribs.   
  
Jack sucked him, running his tongue tightly along the tip, pulling against him. Ianto was so primed it didn’t take long. His gasping breaths grew stronger and fiercer, and his hands on Jack’s hair grabbed him tightly. With a wild moan, Ianto came, the waves of his first orgasm in months rocking him to the core.   
  
Sighing with the relief of it, Ianto fell backwards across the bed. Jack kicked off his shoes then crept up him, crawling above him to kiss him sensuously, Jack’s mouth still tasting of Ianto. “Sorry,” Jack said quietly. “Should have asked. Anyone else since I’ve been gone? Any risks?”  
  
“As if you care,” Ianto said, with difficulty, because he was still gasping. “Not as if you could die from it.”   
  
“It’s polite. We were both clean before, I’m just checking on now.”  
  
“You mean you haven’t...?” Ianto asked, unable to even consider finishing the question.   
  
“I checked the medscan when I got in,” Jack said, not answering the question. It was true, he couldn’t die, but he wasn’t sure he couldn’t be a carrier for something. “I’m clean. You?”  
  
Ianto shook his head. “There’s never anyone else,” he said.   
  
Ianto didn’t even realize what he’d said. But Jack’s face softened, and his entire body seemed to melt against him, molding itself to him until they were almost the same being. It felt fantastic, and Ianto could have stayed like that for the next hour, had not Jack apparently felt just as contented. His guard fell away. “God, I love you,” Jack breathed.   
  
Ianto froze. He could feel the ice shooting up from somewhere near his heart, paralyzing his limbs and closing down his face. Those were The Forbidden Words. His eyes were fixated on Jack’s, so he had the perfect view as his expression changed.   
  
The seductive smile Jack wore shrank and his eyes turned hard and scathing. “This is me, remember,” he said brusquely. “It wasn’t a marriage proposal.” He pushed himself sideways and back onto the pillows. His legs were still entangled with Ianto’s, but he suddenly seemed a thousand miles away.   
  
Ianto was left staring up at the ceiling.   
  
He had thought, ever so long ago, that if he ever heard those words from Jack his mind would start clicking through scenarios. He had thought, in truth, that it would be something to think about. But he realized, as he waited for his mind to engage, that he couldn’t think about it at all. It was as if Jack had just dropped those words into that roaring white noise, and they were too deeply buried for Ianto to even consider what they meant. Since he couldn’t think about what it meant, he tried to think about something, anything, and found all he could think about was the fact that Jack’s weight was no longer pressing him into the bed, and he missed the feel of his warm body.   
  
His hands closed from the half-open position they had frozen in at Jack’s words. Slowly, very slowly, he sat upright. Jack was staring into the space a little above Ianto’s head. His face was cold and hard, and there was that pain again around his eyes. Ianto realized he had hurt him. Swallowing a feeling he didn’t want to identify, Ianto crept over and insinuated himself against Jack’s warm chest.   
  
Only then did Jack move. He stopped staring into space and nuzzled Ianto’s forehead. His hand snaked around him and ran up and down his spine. It felt so good to Ianto, he closed his eyes. “You took me by surprise, is all,” he said, trying to mend the rift. “I didn’t think you’d ever—” He cut himself off. He opened his eyes and watched Jack’s face. “I didn’t think you were the kind of man who’d ever say it.”   
  
Jack’s gaze was uncomfortably deep as he looked back at him. His other hand reached up and gently caressed Ianto’s cheek with his fingertips. They left tingles across his skin. “Life’s too short,” he said simply.   
  
Ianto blinked. With a chill, he realized that wherever Jack had been, it had been the kind of place that made him say such words. This was it, then, wasn’t it. Time to stop playing games. Time to stop pretending one thing was something else. This was not an evening where Ianto could get up at the end of it and say, “This never happened.” Slowly, as if he was holding a wild animal, Ianto rolled until he hovered over Jack. Then he kissed him. Softly. Gently. It seemed obscene that Jack was still wearing clothes. Ianto unbuttoned the top few buttons of his shirt. Jack let him for a minute, then grabbed Ianto’s tie and pulled his face down for another kiss. “You feel so good,” Jack whispered.   
  
As if the sound of words had again triggered the ones Ianto had been thinking all day, Ianto opened his mouth. “Where have you been?” he asked again.   
  
“Really nowhere,” Jack said quietly. “It doesn’t matter.”   
  
Ianto’s face closed, and he pulled away from Jack. “Don’t do this,” he said, crouched half dressed on the end of the bed.   
  
Jack was confused. “Do what?”   
  
“This,” Ianto said. “Still this. If what we’re doing is empty and worthless, fine. But you’re not allowed to do this.”   
  
Jack sat upright. “What am I doing?”  
  
“Pick one or the other,” Ianto said. “Either this means something, or it doesn’t, but I can’t survive in some in-between.”   
  
“What are you talking about?” Jack asked, exasperated.   
  
“You won’t talk to me,” Ianto said. “You just want to fuck me, fine. Do that. But don’t lie to me.”  
  
“I haven’t,” Jack snapped.   
  
“There are different types of lies. I know, I grew very good at telling them. You try to make this real. You invite me out. You tell me, of all things, that you love me. But that doesn’t apparently mean anything to you.” He looked around at his darkened bedroom. This was HIS room, HIS flat. The Hub belonged to Jack — and there, so did Ianto, if he was being honest with himself. But this place was Ianto’s, and he couldn’t stomach being played with here.   
  
Jack didn’t see it that way. “Ianto,” he said, patronizing.   
  
Ianto stood up and disappeared into the bathroom.   
  
“Ianto!”   
  
There was no reply. Jack sighed and buried his head in his hand. This wasn’t fair. He couldn’t enjoy this evening thinking about the past year. He didn’t want the past year to have happened. It didn’t happen. So why should it have happened for him? He was nowhere. He did nothing. None of it mattered. So why was Ianto so insistent?   
  
His eyes closed, lost in his thoughts, Jack didn’t notice that Ianto had returned until he insinuated himself almost in his lap. “You could have a little faith in me,” Ianto whispered.   
  
Jack opened his eyes to a vision. Ianto had undressed in the bathroom. He was completely nude, warm and vulnerable and perfect. Jack’s hands went around his waist without his even deciding to. Warm skin and smooth lines. Ianto was so young, so beautiful. He looked the young man up and down hungrily. Ianto smiled slightly and kissed him, soft and warm. He kept undoing Jack’s buttons. “Don’t lie to me,” he said quietly. “You were somewhere.”   
  
Jack closed his eyes. “I wasn’t lying,” he said. Ianto’s gentle fingers were tiny caresses down his torso. “I just really don’t want to think about it.”   
  
“Well that’s a start,” Ianto said. He opened Jack’s shirt and pulled it off with his braces. He slid his hands under the t-shirt and lifted it over his head. “At least you’re saying what you’re feeling.”   
  
Jack pulled Ianto against him. This was perfection, Ianto’s completely bare skin against his. It was beautiful. This was peace. He needed peace right now. He was fiercely hard, but it didn’t seem to matter.   
  
Ianto didn’t agree. He gently lay Jack back on the pillows and unfastened his trousers. Jack’s lips parted in a contented smile as the fabric was pulled from his waist. Ianto tossed the pants on the floor (leave them. It doesn’t matter. You can pick them up in the morning!) and touched the well-formed cock that reached for him.   
  
Ianto had always tried to keep his eyes closed. At first he had pretended to himself that he didn’t like it, that he was only fucking Jack to keep him from guessing about Lisa. Then, after his loneliness had collapsed in on itself and he had taken Jack back into his bed — not that beds were involved very often, actually — he had tried to ignore what he was doing, pretend it wasn’t real. He was past that, now. Gently, beyond gently, he touched the quivering organ with his tongue. He licked it sensuously, then took the tip in his mouth and kissed it.   
  
The rest was inevitable. It was quite some time later when both of them collapsed, sticky and sweaty, on the bed. Jack gasped, nearly in tears of relief. “Oh, I missed you,” he gasped against Ianto’s mouth. He turned to nuzzle him, and his hot breath whispered into his ear, “Ah, Ianto, I love you so.”   
  
Ianto felt a shiver at the words. He wasn’t sure where it came from. Love was so terrifying. Love meant pain and blood and destruction and death. Love meant sacrifice and murder and agony. Love meant Lisa.   
  
Jack was the antithesis of Lisa in so many ways. Ianto had never loved anyone besides her. Truth to tell had barely kissed anyone besides her. Until Jack came along and had turned his world upside down, turned Ianto inside out.   
  
Ianto didn’t answer. He curled in against Jack’s bare chest like a little boy, their legs intertwining. It felt so insanely good to be held by him, to feel Jack’s strength against him, feel his fingers oh so gently stroking his hair. The truth was, even with Lisa Ianto had never felt so... loved.   
  
Ianto heaved a sigh. He closed his eyes tightly against all the thoughts in his head and let himself fall asleep.  
  
Jack lay awake looking at him. He didn’t want to think about certain things. He didn’t want to remember where he had been. But with Ianto lying so peacefully beside him, his face so omnipresent, he wasn’t sure he could forget. 


	3. Chapter 3

  
Ianto woke with the weight of someone shifting beside him. A warm, hard body that fit his like a glove. He snuggled closer and wrapped his arms around it. This was Jack. Even half asleep, he couldn’t mistake that body, that scent, the way it all made him feel. “Morning,” Ianto whispered.   
  
“Good morning, handsome,” Jack murmured.   
  
“Mm,” Ianto said. This was so perfect, waking up beside Jack. It shouldn’t be allowed, the way Jack made him feel.   
  
Jack leaned down to kiss him, but Ianto pulled away. “What?”   
  
“Morning breath,” Ianto said.   
  
Jack snickered and kissed Ianto sweetly, keeping his lips closed. “This should help,” he said. “Open your eyes.”   
  
Ianto did, and found a kitchen chair propped beside his bed, and on it a tray from the kitchen. On the tray was a plate with toast and an omelet, and... oh, God. His eyes opened wide. That was Lisa’s little bud-vase that Ianto kept on the kitchen windowsill. It perched at the head of the tray, graced with the rose that Jack had brought last night.  
  
Ianto blinked at this innocent usurpation of Lisa’s vase. There was a part of him that wanted to be violently angry. There was another, more sensible part, that knew Jack couldn’t have known, and was trying to be... damn, he was being romantic, wasn’t he. There was a third part, way deep down inside him, that actually thought it rather fitting. His confusion made his voice a little terse as he asked, “What’s this?”   
  
“Breakfast in bed,” Jack said. “I made it for you.” He leaned over Ianto and drew the tray onto his lap. “Don’t bother going to work, I called your boss. I told him you were screwing a stunningly gorgeous captain, and couldn’t be bothered today.”   
  
Ianto looked at him sidelong.   
  
“Funny thing is, that excuse might actually work on me.”   
  
“We still haven’t caught up yet, have we,” Ianto said.   
  
“Not yet.” Jack smiled, but there was that heart-quickening, loin-clenching sorrow chiseling Jack’s face again. “We’re living in stolen time, Ianto.” He whispered Ianto’s name.   
  
Ianto swallowed and suddenly wasn’t hungry. Not for food, anyway. But he couldn’t scorn Jack’s very generous breakfast. It was... amazing. Even the gesture was amazing. Jack was waiting on him. Waiting on HIM, Ianto, taking care of him like he really meant what he had said last night. Ianto took a bite of the omelette. It was tender, just the right amount of seasoning, vegetables nicely balanced. It was delicious. Jack sat back and watched him with evident pleasure.   
  
“You aren’t eating?”   
  
“I ate as I cooked,” Jack said.   
  
Ianto shook his head in wonder. “I had no idea you could cook.”  
  
“You think in my entire life I never took the time to learn how to cook?” Jack asked. “You underestimate me. It’s not a hobby or anything, but I happen to be quite skilled at breakfasts in particular. Useful for smoothing over the night before. Particularly when you can’t remember her name.” He kissed Ianto’s hand. “Ianto,” he smirked. He reached for a mug on the bedside table. “Here. I couldn’t find any coffee, but I made you some dargeeling,” Jack said, handing it over. “Hope it’s how you like it, like an idiot, I’m not sure. You don’t drink coffee at home?”   
  
“No. Lisa never liked it, and I got out of the habit.”   
  
Ianto didn’t know how Lisa had ended up in that sentence. It was probably the vase, twinkling at him. He blinked and looked over at Jack.   
  
Jack was smiling, that damning bright seductive smile. “Enjoy your tea,” was all he said, but his voice was very gentle. “Is there anything else I can get you?”  
  
Ianto stared at him. “Yes,” he said. He put down the fork, picked up the tray and shifted it over to the chair. He grabbed Jack’s face in his hands and pressed him into the bed. “Where have you been?” he asked.   
  
Jack’s face clouded. “Ianto,” he said. “I really don’t want to—”   
  
“No,” Ianto said, clarifying. “Where have YOU been? Two years ago. One year ago.” He caressed Jack’s face, touching his brow, his cheekbones, as if memorizing it. He ran his fingers along the hair on Jack’s temple. “Who are you? That man I knew before was not you. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before. Were you in there?”   
  
Jack smiled a little wistfully. “Yes. I was here,” he said sadly. He leaned his head more comfortably against the pillows. “I think I had my eyes closed.”   
  
Ianto stared into his face for a while longer, feeling his skin beneath his fingers. “And now you’ve opened them?” he asked.   
  
Jack looked self-effacing. “I had them opened for me,” he said. He closed his eyes and sighed. “The world looks so bright.”   
  
“How long has it been since they’ve been open?” Ianto asked.   
  
“Lifetimes,” Jack said. “Not since I was a child.” He gently touched Ianto’s cheek, and the most amazing thing happened. He started — to talk. Really talk. Not about how sexy he was, or what to do, or what he wanted. He was just... talking. “Ever since I was young I felt like I didn’t belong. The Boshane Peninsula was such a tiny place. I was too big, something inside wanted so much more. I didn’t fit. I was in the wrong place, and then I joined the Time Agency trying to find something. What I found was everything, and from then on I felt both in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nothing ever fell into place for me until I met the Doctor. And then it all fell apart around me again. And I was so alone. Wrong place, wrong time. Wrong life.”  
  
Ianto wanted to say he’d felt the same. Out of place, second best, disconnected to anything until he met Lisa, and then it all fell apart around him and left him worse off than before. But he was afraid to say anything. He was afraid to open his mouth and possibly stop this miracle of Jack — TALKING. Actually saying something meaningful.   
  
Jack ran his thumb over Ianto’s lips. “I couldn’t see it,” he said. “I was always waiting for something to happen, something to change. I spent so much of my time... so much of my life was wasted trying to get where I belong.” He shook his head. “I realized it, finally, while I was gone. After I lost all of it... I finally opened my eyes. Where I belonged was here. Earth. Twenty-first century. Britain. Wales. Cardiff. Torchwood.” He smiled at Ianto. “And in your arms, if you’ll have me. Ianto Jones.”   
  
Ianto nuzzled his throat and then whispered in his ear. “I’m here.”   
  
Jack cringed, and then held Ianto very tightly. Things were starting to get heated when Ianto’s cell phone went off. Ianto sighed.   
  
“Don’t answer it,” Jack said.   
  
“I have to,” Ianto said, reaching for it. “If I don’t, she’ll come over.”   
  
She? Jack was surprised. “Who?”   
  
“Gwen,” Ianto said, annoyed. He opened the phone. “Yes, I’m fine. — I’m sure. — Hang up, Gwen.” He snapped the phone shut, then flung himself back onto the bed and stared up at the ceiling.   
  
“What was that about?” Jack asked, rolling over to look down at him.   
  
“It’s nothing,” Ianto said.   
  
“Is Gwen playing post office again,” Jack asked impassively.   
  
“What? No,” Ianto said, sounding even more annoyed. “She’s just been calling me at odd hours ever since—” He cut himself off. He looked to the corners of the morning-lit room, distracted.   
  
Jack was concerned. There was a certain embarrassed sadness to Ianto’s face that he didn’t like. “Ever since what?”   
  
“Nothing,” Ianto said.   
  
Jack did not press him, but he stared at him. His face lowered until the tip of his nose rested on Ianto’s cheek, and Ianto couldn’t shake the weight of his gaze.   
  
Ianto rolled his eyes. “Ever since she caught me two months ago sitting in your office with a gun to my head,” he said brusquely.   
  
Jack stared at him in horror.   
  
“I hadn’t decided to do anything with it,” Ianto said, almost defensively. “It wasn’t the first time I’d done it. The safety was still on.”  
  
“What were you doing?” Jack asked. The words came out gravelly with horror.   
  
“Just holding it.” Ianto said. He couldn’t explain why. How the pain and the horror and the loneliness seemed to ease when he just held the gun to his head. Caressed the muzzle against his temple. Touched his thumb to the safety, gently feeling it. To sometimes pull the trigger, just a little, until the safety engaged, and it wouldn’t go all the way. It was as if he was telling himself — it’s okay. You don’t have to live with it. You can just let it all go, if you decide you really want to. “It just... it felt good,” Ianto said. “To know I had the choice. Feel it heavy in my hands.”   
  
Jack could almost understand that, having had the choice taken from him a century ago, but it spoke to a deeply wounded psyche in Ianto. “Would you have done it?”   
  
Ianto shrugged. “I hadn’t yet,” he said.   
  
“How often have you done that?”   
  
“I didn’t count.”   
  
“How long? Since when?”   
  
Ianto took a long time to answer, and finally said, “Since Canary Wharf.” He stared into his own darkness for a long time before he finished, “But I couldn’t... ‘cause she needed me, and then....” he shook his head.   
  
Jack suddenly grabbed Ianto and held him almost tight enough to bruise. Ianto gasped. Jack was shaking. “You’re not allowed!” Jack hissed. He looked desperately down into Ianto’s face. “Ever. You hear me? Don’t you dare!” He crushed the young man to him until Ianto squirmed.   
  
“Jack. You’re hurting me.”   
  
Jack released him, but his breath was shaky. Ianto stared at him. “This really spooks you, doesn’t it,” he said.   
  
“Oh, hell,” Jack whispered. He tilted his head back and stared into whatever was behind his closed lids. He sighed, shakily, as if he’d just been rescued off a crumbling building.   
  
Ianto smiled briefly. “Spooked Gwen too. That’s why she keeps calling me. She says it’s a minimum suicide watch, they taught it to her in the force. If I don’t answer, she comes and bangs on my door until I open. If that fails, she’ll call the cops. In theory knowing that she’ll call will keep me from doing anything.”   
  
“Remind me to thank her,” Jack said bleakly.   
  
“I don’t think I’d have done it, Jack,” Ianto said. “I did it so often, it got to be a habit. And while you were gone... I didn’t have a lot of... other ways to ease the tension.” He reached down towards Jack’s cock...  
  
And was utterly shocked by Jack’s hand, which stopped him. “There could have been an accident,” Jack pointed out.   
  
Ianto stared at him. Jack, deferring sex? This was a man who would steal ten minutes for a screw while a weevil was trying to beat his way out of the car, and he was deferring sex to talk? “Please, Ianto, stop it,” Jack said. “You can’t make me go through that again.”   
  
“Go through what again?” Ianto asked.   
  
Jack hesitated. “I’ve seen enough friends shoot themselves in the head,” he said finally. He covered his face with his hands. “God, I feel sick,” he murmured.   
  
Ianto watched him for a long time. His face had gone pale, and his hands really were shaking. Slowly, as if it might turn out to be a snake, Ianto took one of Jack’s hands and held it to his cheek. He lightly kissed each of the fingertips and then, ever so gently, closed his teeth on the tip of Jack’s thumb.   
  
“Mm,” Jack said, and let himself relax again.   
  
“I’m sorry,” Ianto whispered.   
  
Jack opened his eyes.   
  
“I didn’t think anyone cared.”   
  
Jack caught Ianto’s jaw in his hand and gently brushed his lips with his thumb. “I’ve been a right ass,” he said distinctly. Ianto licked his lower lip, and Jack looked away. It was too evocative. “I’m the one you should shoot in the head. Or through the heart,” he added softly.   
  
“You were gone, Jack. You didn’t even say goodbye. You didn’t say if you were coming back. I didn’t even....” he stopped and looked down.   
  
“What?” Jack asked.   
  
“You’d only just risen from the dead, Jack,” Ianto whispered. “You hadn’t been back more than four hours. Then you’re gone for six months, and... I thought you were dead. I knew you were dead, I just knew it. You’d been doing everything you could to die.” Ianto shook his head. “It felt like everyone I really cared about was dead. When I held that gun to my head... it felt as though I could see across a ravine. I knew there was no other way to see you again.”   
  
“I’m sorry,” Jack said. “I didn’t have time to tell you.” He sighed. “A hundred years of waiting for him, and all he could do was run from me.” His eyes were pure pain as he said, “He didn’t want me to catch him. He couldn’t bear even looking at me.”  
  
“Your Doctor?”   
  
“The Doctor,” Jack confirmed. “It seems I’m beyond unnatural. Just wrong, he said. And I think he was ashamed. He ran until we reached the end of the universe. The deep blackness of nothing.” He shook his head. “You have no idea the depth of that nothingness.”  
  
He took a deep breath. “Then things only got worse. We found a man... a man mad beyond evil.” Jack hadn’t really realized he had started talking. The words were just pouring out of him, as if they were a sickness he had to purge. “And he came back to earth and destroyed everything. Harold Saxon and the tocklophane destroyed a tenth of the population of the earth in one day. And spent the rest of the year preparing to destroy the universe.”   
  
“Harold Saxon?” Ianto asked. “But he was just assassinated. Was that you?”   
  
“No,” Jack said evenly. “It was his wife. But it would have been me, if I’d had the chance. Only one man would shed a tear for the Master, and it wasn’t going to be me.”   
  
“Is this in the future?” Ianto asked. “Is that how the world ends?”   
  
“It’s how the world ended,” Jack said bleakly. “Already. It should all be happening now. There should be blood running in the streets. I wasn’t lying to you, Ianto. It wasn’t real. I was nowhere. It doesn’t matter.”   
  
“How?”   
  
“Time reset,” Jack said. “None of it happened.”   
  
Ianto was quiet for a long time, and then said, “It happened to you.”   
  
Jack closed his eyes and sighed.   
  
“He hurt you. Didn’t he.” He held Jack very quietly as he said, “There’s a darkness in your eyes. And you look at me as if you can’t believe I’m real. I know what that pain looks like,” Ianto said. “He hurt you. And more than just your body.”   
  
Jack licked his lips. “Killing and conquering the universe was the Master’s job,” he said grimly. “Torturing people was his hobby. Certain people. The Doctor. And me.” He paused. “It is quite possible he was only torturing me to torture the Doctor. That was the way he thought.”  
  
The bright morning sunshine and the smell of well-seasoned omelet was a bizarre juxtaposition to Jack’s grim words. Ianto stayed beside him, warm and open, but Jack was barely aware of him anymore. The words were pouring from him, like a sibyl, and he couldn’t stop. “He took to killing me. Several times a day. Just to watch me come back. Then he started finding new and interesting ways. Seeing what would happen if my head was cut off, for example. Or the time he tried to shrink me into something the size of a doll. I still don’t know how he did that. All I know is it hurt. He joked, when I came back. He said I made a great action figure.” He took a deep breath. “Finally killing me got boring. He decided to hurt me instead. So he went after all of you.”   
  
Ianto swallowed. So this was the darkness in Jack’s face. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it anymore, but by this time he was sure Jack needed to say it. If Jack didn’t get to purge this, he’d have to swallow it, and Ianto was afraid of what would happen if he did.   
  
Jack’s eyes were distant, as if he was looking somewhere else. “Owyn was lucky,” Jack said. “He ran.” 


	4. Chapter 4

  
  
“I thought you might like to watch something!” Saxon said with his maniacal grin. “It must get so boring, nothing but these blank military grey walls to stare at all day. Or is this ocean grey? It should be military grey, I’ll make sure it is. In any case, I thought I’d give you a little pick me up!”   
  
Jack rolled his eyes. “Would you just shoot me and get it over with?” he asked.   
  
“I’m bored with shooting you!” the Master said, as if it was entirely Jack’s fault. “It’s always the same. Honestly, from the way you act you’d think killing you was the height of entertainment! You’re not very original, you know. Electro impulses stop, cells cease dividing and then, pop, back it all comes again. It’s like those trick birthday candles you humans put on the cakes of fifty-year-olds, puff, out it goes, then snap, crackle, pop, up it sparks again. Of course, in your case the snap and the crackle only happen if I’ve broken something.” He laughed indulgently.   
  
He grinned as his military lackeys dragged in a large television monitor. “Ah, here it is! Did you ever see that show, teletubbies? Love that show! Been looking everywhere for one of those little television creatures, they must be very rare, you don’t keep them in any of the zoos I’ve been searching.” He picked up a remote and pointed it at the screen. “Come on, then,” he said. “I hope you enjoy your little treat. What’s your favorite movie, human?”   
  
“Anything where the heartless dictator gets disemboweled,” Jack growled.   
  
The Master’s mouth opened as if he was mortified. “I think that was a subtle jibe. Do you think so?” he asked the soldiers. They knew better than to answer. “You’re not much of a lady, Harkness. Here I am, giving you a wonderful little gift, and all you can do is try and dig at my ego. I’m hurt, Harkness, I really am hurt.” He pressed the button on the remote and a grainy, black and white image popped onto the screen. It seemed to be a security flyby of a series of gutted city buildings. There were no windows left, and half the walls were crumbling in on themselves from the initial attack of the creatures. Intermittently jumping from one point of view to another, the sequence of events was not easy to follow. “Look,” the Master said, as if commenting on a sporting event. “Out in the corner there, do you see the infrared?” A pair of figures lit up in lurid green.   
  
Jack hadn’t planned on watching, but he couldn’t help it as the recording from the tocklaphaine rose over an obstruction and zoomed in on two figures. One was dark haired, female, Asian. The other was male, saturnine of face. Jack gulped. Owyn and Tosh.   
  
“There, there!” the Master pointed. “There, the male’s about to run. They’re going to split up. Watch!”   
  
Jack’s eyes were glued to the screen as Owyn turned to run, shouting at Tosh to go the other way. There was no sound, but there didn’t have to be. The tocklaphaine followed at a subdued pace as Owyn dodged and wove, trying to avoid the deadly mechanoid. Jack wanted to close his eyes, certain where this was going, but he couldn’t help but watch. Owyn deserved it, not to die completely alone. Jack at least had to watch it. Someone had to be there for him, even after the fact.   
  
“There, this is the fun part!” the Master said giddily, and as Jack watched four more tocklophaine surged into the view of the second, right ahead of Owyn. Owyn was caught up sharp, and then jinked left, throwing himself behind a pillar. As the point of view changed to a different mechanoid, Jack saw that Tosh had been cornered by four more. Owyn ran right past her, and was brought up short again. Tosh shouted something at him, but Jack couldn’t catch what. Owyn looked torn for a fraction of a second, and then ducked, rolling away from her.   
  
The Master had thoughtfully zoomed in on Tosh’s next words, a soundless, desperate cry of “No!” The next frame illuminated the reason for her cry, as Owyn, unable to stop his momentum, tried to veer away from another mechanoid, lost his balance, and fell through a dilapidated wall.   
  
The point of view changed again, then, as another mechanoid watched the fall from a building across the street. Owyn fell silently and peacefully, almost in slow motion, twirling briefly as if any moment he would swoop up and fly away to safety. Jack kept his tears firmly in check as he watched Owyn fall. Owyn, his angry, unruly, amoral sometimes friend, falling like a meteor from the sky, until the earth came up to kiss him and jolted him asleep.   
  
Jack cringed at the impact, as if he was the one who had fallen. His eyes were shining, but he would not cry. He would NOT cry, not in front of the Master. “What did you do to Tosh?” he asked, his voice trembling.   
  
The Master grinned evilly. “All in good time, Captain Harkness,” he said, and he backed out of the cell.   
  
“You let her go!” Jack shouted at him. “You let her go, you evil pig!”   
  
The Master laughed, as if he’d been given a treat. “I love how incorrigible you are! As if you somehow are in any position to give anyone orders! It’s charming!” He hummed with delight. “I’ll let you have the video for the whole night,” he said with a grin. “It’s the least I can do for you. You seem pretty tied up.”   
  
And he left Jack alone for the next twelve hours with the constant repeat of the ghastly movie. Worried about Tosh, grieving for Owyn, it wasn’t until he was quite sure that the Master was asleep that night before he let himself cry.   
  
  
  
***  
  
  
  
“He ran,” Jack said, “and he fell, but that was the worst the Master could do to him.”   
  
Ianto lay perfectly still and gazed at Jack. He was afraid to move, for fear that something would break. As if the horrors of Jack’s last year were a poison in a delicate glass bottle, and that the least touch would shatter it, swallowing his lover in a cloud of toxic smoke.   
  
“Tosh,” Jack said slowly. “Was forced. To make a choice.”   



	5. Chapter 5

  
Jack was dragged from his cell the next morning, the patterns of Owyn’s death burned into his retina. He had meant to stop watching, but he couldn’t. The flickering movement had kept drawing his eyes, and he had found himself watching again and again and again.   
  
Jack could barely stand, he’d been dangling so long, and his hands were still bound. When they finally threw him on the main deck, he fell to the ground. Trish and the rest of the Jones family were standing, stricken, in a knot by the windows. That was all Jack had a chance to see before a pair of thin arms wrapped themselves around him and fresh tears dripped onto his face.   
  
“Jack! Jack!” Tosh tried to smooth his filthy brow, but the Master grabbed her by the hair and pulled her away.   
  
“Leave her alone!” Jack roared, but he was clubbed in the kidneys by one of his handlers. He grunted and collapsed again, and could only watch as Tosh was dragged, on her knees, back to the window. There was smoke outside the plate glass of the aircraft carrier. Clouds and clouds of fresh, black smoke.   
  
The Master pressed Tosh’s head to the glass, alongside another tear streaked smudge that showed where he had been forcing her before. “Your friend is quite the bleeding heart,” the Master said. “She asks me to burn Japan to the ground, and then cries as I do it. Can’t she make up her mind?”   
  
“He left her no choice!” Tish Jones cried. “She was told to pick the islands, Great Britain or Japan.”   
  
“And she made her choice,” the Master said loudly, “and who said you could talk? Men!”   
  
One of his military slaves took hold of Tish and forced her to sit down. He muttered an apology as he wrapped a gag gently around her mouth. Trish stared at the Master with unrestrained hatred.   
  
“She made her choice,” the Master said again. “And I thought you should get to see the consequences. Just as everyone else does.”   
  
Tosh continued to sob as the islands of Japan burned before her eyes. The carrier was low enough to the ground they could see the carnage. Tiny human figures ran through the streets, many of them on fire. The tocklophane soared in force, great rivers of mechanoid death. They were too far to hear the screams, but Jack could distinguish the smaller forms of children in the dying throng.   
  
Jack forced himself onto his knees and scanned the room for the Doctor. He sat, ancient, listless and exhausted, in his wheel chair. When Jack caught his eyes he sighed with sorrow and bowed his head. Jack begged him, silently, to stop this. To try anything. The one person the Master would never hurt was the Doctor.   
  
The Doctor turned his head from Jack’s gaze, and Jack knew it was for the same reason the Doctor had abandoned him. The Doctor had left him alone. For the same reason, the Master couldn’t. He had to see how far he could push this “fixed point in time and space”. Killing him had started to pall. Now his torture had taken a different turn. He was going after Jack’s heart.   
  
Jack knew there were people dying below him, and his friend was suffering in front of him, and he knew it was all his fault. His face scrunched in pain. “Tosh!” he whispered.   
  
“That’s. Enough,” the Doctor suddenly said.   
  
The Master looked up, and dragged Tosh around with him. “What was that?”   
  
“I said. That’s. Enough,” the Doctor croaked. “You’ve played your little game. Now stop it.”   
  
“Why should I?” the Master said. “It’s so much FUN! Isn’t it fun to watch people suffer? Wasn’t it fun to watch as I was captured by Rasselon’s warriors on Gallifrey? Wasn’t it fun to see me melting as my regeneration failed? How often have you watched me burn, die or dragged into hell? How often have you tried to stop it? Isn’t it FUN?”   
  
“I don’t. Pretend. To be perfect,” the Doctor said. “But this. Serves. No. Purpose.” He stared heavily at the Master, and as happened many times between the two of them, Jack could see a level of communication that went far beyond what they were saying. “End it now.”   
  
“End it now?” the Master asked. “End it now? All right.” He turned down to Tosh, who he still gripped by the hair. “You said earlier this morning, you wish you had fallen with your friend?”   
  
Jack tried to get to his feet. “No!” he cried.   
  
“Wish granted!” The Master pressed a button on the side of the wall, and the window shot open. A cruel wind pierced through the room, and without her even struggling, the Master pushed Tosh out of it onto the burning island.   
  
“No!” Jack flung himself after her, hoping he could at least fall out the window with her so she wouldn’t die alone. But he was thwarted. The Master himself grabbed hold of him and kicked him away from the whistling wind. He stabbed the button and the window snapped closed again. Jack pressed himself to the glass and watched, his friend, his dear friend, who had worked with him, alone, for nearly a year rebuilding Torchwood, the nights they had laughed over Sechwan as she singlehandedly rewired the hub. Tosh. Toshiko Sato. Falling onto a burning country she, cruelly, had been forced to believe she’d destroyed.   
  
Jack saw red. He roared like a werewolf and launched himself at the Master, planning to bash the madman’s brains against the floor. He didn’t get the chance. The last thing Jack felt before he woke up, again dangling in his cell, was the Master’s laser screwdriver pressed against his forehead.   
  
  
  
***   
  
  
  
“To make a choice and to die with it,” Jack said. “Japan or Britain, he said. So he destroyed the islands of Japan and everyone on them, and forced Tosh to believe it was her doing. Then he killed her in front of me.”   
  
Ianto thought about Tosh, her soft heart and her generosity, and he knew it was the worst torture imaginable. Tosh would gladly have been skinned alive rather then let anyone else be hurt. And an entire country? Japan or Britain — it was no choice. Her heritage or her life. There was nothing crueler. Ianto closed his eyes in pain at the very thought.   
  
“Gwen and Rhys he captured together,” Jack said. 


	6. Chapter 6

  
There was no preamble. No warning. The Master seemed to be getting bored with his games. Either that or he realized that prolonging this one would only soften the blow.   
  
Gwen and Rhys were brought in together. “Hiding,” the Master said to Jack, without even announcing his arrival, “in the slave quarters, and not very effectively. You should tell them, next time, slaves don’t have any hope. Organizing resistance was a very foolish thing to do if you’re trying to hide out.”   
  
No. Not Gwen. Not Gwen with her empathic eyes and her gap-toothed smile and her desperately concealed passion. Not her. “What are you going to do to them?” He was begging already, and he was only asking a question.   
  
“Why nothing!” the Master laughed. “Your little friend had this.” He pulled a gun from his waistband. “Lovely little thing. Didn’t you say you taught her how to shoot it?”   
  
Jack closed his eyes. He didn’t know what he had said. The torture had been long and intense. He’d said everything, at some point or another. The Master probably knew more about him than any man living. He knew his childhood, his family members, his friends. He knew about Rose and the time vortex. He knew about the Rift. And he knew, in detail, about every member of Torchwood. Jack had lied as often as he could, but in the end, the Master had drawn all of it out of him with the pain.   
  
“Shoot it now, Gwen Cooper,” the Master said, and pushed it into Gwen’s hand. But he didn’t let go. He pointed the gun at Rhys’s head and said again, “Shoot it now.”   
  
Gwen was in tears. “No!” she whimpered. “Please! Please don’t!”   
  
“Fight him, Gwen!” Jack shouted, but he knew she wasn’t up to it. The Master was no cyberman, but he was no weakling, either. Gwen was thin as a rake, half starved and weak from malnutrition. Rhys looked in shock. He had barely blinked since the Master had dragged him in. As the gun touched his temple he closed his eyes, just waiting for the bullet.   
  
Gwen wrestled and tried to pull away. She tried to point the gun at the Master. It simply wasn’t going to happen. With a final sharp pop the gun went off, and Rhys dropped like a deer. The smell of gunpowder mingled with the sound of Gwen’s screams.   
  
The Master pulled the gun from Gwen’s unresisting hand and left her to cradle the corpse on the floor.   
  
“Stop this,” Jack said. “Stop this now. Kill me. Kill me, let her live. I don’t care what you do to me. Burn me alive. Bury me in molten lead. Seal me in concrete, let me drift unprotected in open space, shoot me into the sun, I don’t care, just stop this!”   
  
The Master looked at him with narrowed eyes. “Are you bargaining with your life?” he said. “Have you never heard of inflation? Print too much and the currency becomes worthless.”   
  
He grabbed Gwen by the collar of her worn slave’s shirt and dragged her toward Jack. “You both know what comes next.”   
  
“No,” Jack whispered.   
  
Gwen gulped and looked up at him. “Jack...” she whispered.   
  
“I’m sorry,” Jack said. “I’m sorry.”   
  
The Master untied Jack’s hand. It was so numb from hanging that he couldn’t move it. He tried. God, how he tried, tried to get those unresponsive muscles to move that gun, to point it at the Master’s head and blow his brains across the room. But he couldn’t do it. Immortal he might have been. Omnipotent he was not.   
  
As the Master brought the still hot gun against Gwen’s forehead, Gwen focused her eyes on Jack’s. “It’s not your fault,” she whispered before the Master squeezed Jack’s finger on the trigger and she fell.   
  
The Master let go of Jack’s hand and stepped back. Jack used all his strength to lift that gun again, point it at the Master, and start pulling the trigger. There was no response other than an impotent click. The gun had had only the two bullets left.   
  
Jack threw the empty pistol at the Master’s head. The Time Lord ducked with a humorous, “Ooh! That was a close one!”   
  
Jack was shaking with rage and grief. He stared at the Master, as if he would burn him to a cinder with his eyes. “Don’t you touch another one of my friends,” Jack spat at him.   
  
And to his surprise, the Master cringed. He stared at Jack in consternation and then quietly backed away, no flippant statements, no giddy exaltation of triumph. He left Jack alone with the two corpses.   
  
Jack’s hand was still free. He reached up to rub the tears from his eyes, and then blinked. His fingers were glowing. Just faintly, but a thin, golden glow was pouring out of his eyes along with his tears. As Jack watched the light faded. The last time he’d seen that, he’d been being killed fairly thoroughly. He thought it was the glow of his immorality. He guessed it wouldn’t hurt a human, but it certainly seemed to bother a Time Lord. In fact, it was probably the presence of the Time Lord that made it so volatile. Not that that knowledge would do him much good. It wasn’t as if he could force that much grief and anger on a regular basis. He could already feel the despair building. There wasn’t much left of his spirit by now.   
  
  
  
***  
  
  
  
  
“At least that was quick,” Jack said. “Though he did leave their corpses in my cell for three days.”   
  
Jack stopped, then. Ianto waited, and waited. He took a deep breath and waited some more. Finally, he couldn’t help it. “What did he do to me?” he asked, his voice nothing more than a slight hum.   
  
“Nothing,” Jack said, dully. “He never touched you.”   



	7. Chapter 7

  
Ianto looked comparatively well, when he was brought in. He’d apparently been living in the work camps with his sister. He’d gone quietly when the military slaves had identified him, and as far as he knew, they hadn’t gone after his family. He was brought in, chained to the floor by his hands, and pushed into a chair. He couldn’t raise his hands above his stomach, though if he had wanted to he could have pushed the chair aside and lain down.   
  
Jack was surprised when they bound him and then left him. He stared across the cell at his erstwhile lover. “He’s going to kill you, you know.”  
  
Ianto’s face was impassive. “I know.”  
  
“I’m sorry,” Jack whispered. “This is all my fault.”  
  
“You mean you’re the one who gave the order to kill everybody?” Ianto asked.   
  
“No,” Jack said. “But it’s my fault he’s here. If I hadn’t gone after the Doctor...”   
  
“If I hadn’t joined Torchwood,” Ianto said. “If I hadn’t brought Lisa there. If I’d never tried to cure her.” He shook his head. “You know better than that. You can’t blame yourself for things you didn’t want to have happen.”   
  
Jack swallowed. Ianto was being uncomfortably forgiving. Jack wanted to hate himself. “How are you, Ianto?”   
  
“For living in an apocalyptic dystopia, tied in a chair by a madman and about to die?” Ianto asked. “I’m okay.”   
  
Jack laughed bleakly. “He’s going to torture you first.”  
  
“I’d gathered that,” Ianto said. “Oh, God, don’t cry.”   
  
Jack couldn’t help it. He hadn’t had the chance to really talk to Owyn, or to Tosh, or to Gwen. Never got the chance to say Goodbye. Now Ianto was sitting there in that chair calmly and casually, and Jack could see his death looming over him like a shadow.  
  
“He’s really been putting you through hell,” Ianto said quietly.   
  
Jack nodded. “That’s why you’re here.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
“He killed the others,” Jack said. “To hurt me.”   
  
“I know. He told me.”   
  
Jack stared at him. “You’re so calm.”  
  
Ianto tilted his head, considering. “I think I used up all my panic in the first two weeks,” he said. “We’re all waiting for death, now. There’s not much hope.”   
  
“There’s a small hope,” Jack said, but even he didn’t know what Martha Jones might be able to do. The Doctor had faith in her, though. That was something.   
  
“Very small, I think,” Ianto said. He looked down at his knees. “Do you know what they’re going to do to me?”   
  
“No,” Jack whispered. “But I’m sorry.”   
  
“I know that,” Ianto said. “There’s nothing to forgive, but if you need it... I forgive you.”   
  
Jack sobbed, half a despairing laugh, but he didn’t have time to respond. The door opened and several of the military slaves came in, flanked by a few of the tocklaphane. “Don’t touch him!” Jack shouted.   
  
“Not our orders,” said one of the slaves.   
  
“Not supposed to touch the pretty boy,” said one of the tocklaphane. “Just the unnatural one. Time to have lots and lots of fun for the Mister Master.” It opened its side walls and the whirring blades of pain chinged in readiness.   
  
“No,” Ianto whispered. As the screaming started he tried to rise from his chair, but he was too firmly bound. “No! Stop it!”   
  
But it didn’t matter what he had to say. They could barely hear his voice above the screaming.   



	8. Chapter 8

  
  
Seven hours later, the torture stopped. Jack had died twenty-seven times, once just from the pain itself. Ianto was white faced and shaken. He had vomited twice, and each time Tish Jones was forced to come in amidst the screaming and clean him up. “I’m so sorry,” she’d whispered to him each time.   
  
Ianto had no more tears left. When Jack died from the final cut, the torturers left, and Tish came in and offered him some water. Ianto took it, re-hydrating himself through a straw. “How can he do this?” Ianto asked her. Jack was exhausted. His clothes were blood soaked and his face was pale. It was taking him a long time to come back from the dead.   
  
“He’s pure evil,” Tish said quietly.   
  
“But to Jack!”   
  
Tish looked over at Jack, hanging dead in his chains. “He’s done it before. Jack is too unusual. The Master likes killing things. He can kill Jack over and over and over. Sometimes he’ll make us do it if we’ve done something wrong. Jack never blames us, though.” She looked over to the doorway. “I’m not supposed to stay. I’m sorry.”   
  
“Not your fault,” Ianto whispered before she left.   
  
As the door closed behind her, Jack took a deep breath, his lungs finally reactivating. He looked around. “Where are they?”   
  
“They left,” Ianto said. He’d thought he was through crying, but he wasn’t. His face crumpled. “What are they doing to you!”   
  
“Thank god,” Jack said through clenched teeth. “They could be doing it to you.”   
  
Ianto looked down as his tears fell again.   
  
“Don’t cry!” Jack hissed. “He’s done this before, he’s just using me to get to you. He’s taken it one step further, that’s all. He’s torturing me. He tortured the others to get to me. Now he’s torturing me again to torture you to torture me. Don’t let it get to you!”   
  
Ianto gulped. “Okay,” he whispered. “I’ll try.” He sniffed. “I was prepared for pain. I wasn’t prepared for this.”   
  
Jack groaned. “I’m sorry!” He stared across at him, his face pale, his eyes shadowed from the tears. “God, I wish I could hold you.”   
  
Ianto looked up at him. “I wish that, too.”  
  
Jack wanted to tell him so much. What he had meant to him, what a blasted fool he had been all this time. “I never appreciated you,” Jack said. “Back before all this. I never—”   
  
“Shut up,” Ianto said wearily. “Do you think it matters now?” He stared across the cell into Jack’s eyes. “You know what I used to think?” he said. “I used to let you... in the hub. I’d let you do anything, really. Because it didn’t matter. It wasn’t real to me. I’d press my body against you and think, ‘None of this is real. This isn’t happening. This never happened.’ Even when I was sore to the point of agony, even when you’d made it so I could hardly walk, even when I wanted you so badly I couldn’t stop thinking about being with you again. I wouldn’t admit that any of it was really happening.”   
  
Jack closed his eyes and bowed his head. He had made so many ruthless mistakes with Ianto. He wasn’t much better than the Master, really, just using people for his own ends.   
  
“You know what I think now?” Ianto said.   
  
Jack shook his head, defeated.   
  
“None of this is happening,” Ianto said. “None of this is real. This is all some terrible nightmare. We’re not really here.” He swallowed once before he asked, “So where are we?”   
  
Jack looked up. “What?”   
  
Ianto licked his lips. “Where are we?” he asked, and his voice was shaking. “I think we’re back at the hub. Gwen and Owyn and Tosh have all gone home. I just snuck into your office.”   
  
Jack smiled, understanding. “No,” he said. “Not the office. Behind it, my room.”   
  
“Your bed,” Ianto whispered. “Down the ladder. You’re there. I’m in the office. I peer over. What are you wearing?”  
  
“Just jeans,” Jack said. “I’m resting.”  
  
“God, you’re gorgeous. I can’t help it. You see me, and...?”   
  
“I sit up,” Jack said. “It’s so wonderful to see you. Come here.”  
  
“I’m here,” Ianto whispered.   
  
“You feel so good,” Jack said. “I press you against the ladder. Your body melts to me. I pull your jacket off. I loosen your tie.”   
  
“I’ve got my arms around you,” Ianto said. “My fingers in the small of your back. I can’t help it, I’m already reaching under your jeans. Your ass is so taut.”  
  
Jack grinned. “I’ve got your shirt unbuttoned,” he whispered. “I can feel your skin against mine. You’re warm.”   
  
“You’re hard,” Ianto replied. “I can feel you against me. You always make it so I can barely breathe.”   
  
“I love the taste of your throat,” Jack breathed. His tongue touched his teeth in subdued sensuality. “Can’t get enough of it.” His voice was heady. “I’ve got your shirt off, now. Your skin is so warm, I could burn in you. Undo your trousers.”   
  
“You do it,” Ianto grinned.   
  
“Oh, you’re evil,” Jack smiled back. “I kiss my way down your chest.”   
  
Ianto closed his eyes, imagining. “I’m hard enough you’re going to have a hard time,” Ianto admitted.   
  
“That’s my favorite kind of hard time.” Jack swallowed a laugh.   
  
“I’m glad I’m here,” Ianto said quietly.   
  
Dropping the illusion for one brief second, Jack’s face clouded over. “I’m not,” he whispered. “I’ve got your cock, now,” he said, drawing the veil back. “It’s smooth against my hand. I’m going to have to kiss it, I can’t help it.”   
  
“I want you to,” Ianto said.   
  
“You taste good. Salt. Heat.” He pushed his tongue against the roof of his mouth, imagining Ianto. “I think I could swallow you whole.”   
  
Ianto swallowed. “Not yet,” he said.   
  
“Not yet.”   
  
“I want to push you onto the bed,” Ianto said. “I want to cover you, feel the heat of your breath.”  
  
“Do it then.”  
  
“Okay.”   
  
Jack smiled. “You know I love the weight of you. The feel of you against me, hard and hungry. Are you ever going to take these jeans off me?”  
  
“Right now,” Ianto said.   
  
At this moment they both hesitated. It was usually about now they decided how they were going to make love. Though usually before now Ianto or Jack had forced things a little faster. Usually their lovemaking was rough, Ianto burning through his anger or his grief, or Jack losing his patience and turning the tables back on him. Often there were handcuffs or other types of bondage. This time, it was all an illusion. There was more than enough bondage going on already, and roughness was the last thing either one of them wanted.   
  
“Kiss me,” Jack said. They rarely did that, either. And usually it was demanding.   
  
Ianto’s face was hungry as he whispered, “Like you were porcelain.”   
  
Jack closed his eyes as he imagined that kiss. “You’re sweet,” he said.   
  
“You taste like coffee,” Ianto said wryly, and Jack bit his lip.   
  
“That wasn’t what I meant.”   
  
“Why not?” Ianto asked.   
  
They grinned at each other across the torturous prison. After a long moment Jack’s smile faded. “I think I just want to hold you.”   
  
“For all eternity,” Ianto said quietly.   
  
They spent the rest of the night making love in hushed whispers, far away from torture and death and the end of the world.   
  
Jack knew the rhythm of the ship. Though there was no window in his grey cell, and the Master kept the Valiant dancing all around the planet, Jack was pretty sure the morning shift was about to come on. “I’m frightened, you know that?” he asked. “They’re going to come back.”  
  
“I know,” Ianto said.   
  
“I can take the torture, you know,” Jack said. “After a while it stops meaning anything. Your brain adapts... or something. The screams can keep coming, but they don’t mean anything bad. Pain stops meaning anything at all.” He looked over at Ianto. “But I don’t like watching you.”   
  
Ianto nodded. “All right,” he said. “I won’t hear it.” He stared into Jack’s eyes. “I’ll go back to the hub. I’ll find you there.”  
  
“Good,” Jack said. “‘Cause that’s where I really am. This place, this pain — it’s not real.”   
  
“I believe that,” Ianto whispered.   
  
But when they came in, it didn’t matter.   
  
They brought in a machine, covered in a tarp. Both Jack and Ianto eyed it warily. It was huge, big enough that it seemed to fill the cell. Apparently the torture yesterday had just been softening him up. “We’re going to have to put you in here, sir,” said the military slave, and loosened Jack’s bonds.   
  
“Don’t struggle,” said the slave. “Or they’ll slice him.” One of the tocklophane was hovering menacingly above Ianto’s head. Jack went quietly as they pushed him toward the sheet covered machine.   
  
“Good morning!” came a voice from over the speaker. The Master had decided to make a call. “How are you today, Captain Harkness? Over our little session yesterday?”   
  
“Die slowly cut into a thousand pieces,” Jack snapped at the disembodied voice.   
  
“You could be nicer,” the Master said. “And after I found you this lovely little present. Show them what it is, boys,” the Master said. With a grim flourish, one of the military slaves pulled the tarp off the machine.   
  
Ianto made a sound as if he had just been stabbed.   
  
It was a cyber conversion unit. It was, in fact, a portable modification of the very one from the hub, with Ianto’s special adjustments glinting from the controls. He recognized the dent along the bottom of the control panel. He knew that unit so well. He had memorized it. It pervaded his nightmares. It poisoned his thoughts. It had kept Lisa alive. It had nearly killed Gwen. It had destroyed Ianto’s love and utterly and completely ruined his life. Jack did start to struggle, now, as the military slaves pushed him toward the surgery bed.   
  
“No!” Ianto shouted, straining against his own bonds. “That was destroyed!”   
  
“You think I’m not clever enough to put it back together again?” the Master smarmed over the speaker. “I’m a Time Lord.” He spoke to the military slaves. “Strap him in.”   
  
“Don’t!”   
  
“Ianto, don’t listen!” Jack said, straining against the slaves and the straps. “This isn’t real! Go back to the hub!”   
  
“That’s right,” the Master said. “Go back to your little fantasies. Ignore the screams of your lover as he is turned into a cyberman before your eyes. Eternally altered. Forever cyber-kind. Or maybe the ‘upgrade’ will ‘fail’. Neither human nor cyber, neither one thing nor the other, part dead, part alive, part machine, no part working with the others. Immortally incomplete.”   
  
“Don’t do this!” Ianto screamed.   
  
“You two really are made for each other,” the Master said. “Two of a kind. Screaming at me as if your orders have any effect. You know there’s only one way to stop this, Ianto Jones.”   
  
“Ianto, close your eyes,” Jack said. “I’ll be fine, you hear me? I’ll be fine, this isn’t happening!”   
  
“But it is,” Ianto groaned.  
  
“He can’t change me, Ianto!” Jack shouted. “It won’t work! It’s just another form of torture!”   
  
“You can’t know that,” Ianto said. “There’s no going back. Those who are changed stay changed. You told me that yourself.” Ianto’s fists clenched as he wept. “You knew it would come to this, you bastard!”   
  
Jack thought he was talking to the Master, but he wasn’t sure. He might have been talking to Jack. He might even have been talking to himself. Ianto shifted in his seat. Without too much difficulty, he pulled something from a holster on his hip. Something that had been hidden by his suit jacket.  
  
Ice gripped Jack’s heart. “Ianto? What is that?”   
  
Ianto didn’t answer. He simply shifted the gun in his hands.   
  
“Ianto!” The panic was raw in Jack’s voice. “What is that?”   
  
“There’s only one bullet,” Ianto said, his voice bleak and monotone. “I knew he was going to torture me, but he said there was one way to end it. Whenever I chose.”   
  
“Don’t!”   
  
Ianto stared at him. “I can’t watch it happen again, Jack. Not to you. You know I’d rather die.”   
  
“It won’t stop him!”   
  
Ianto shook his head. “This isn’t for you. Because I wouldn’t give up on you, Jack.” He sobbed, all the pain of Lisa’s death and all the horror of Jack’s torture going through him all at once. “You know I wouldn’t. But I just can’t!”   
  
“Don’t do it, Ianto!” Jack sobbed. “Please! Please, for me! Don’t do it!”   
  
“I have to,” Ianto whispered. “I can’t go through it again.”   
  
“Ianto!” The desperation was so strong it wasn’t even Jack’s voice anymore.   
  
Ianto stared at him. “I love you, Jack.”   
  
“Don’t!”   
  
But Ianto did. He couldn’t reach his head. Instead he pointed the gun at his breast and shot himself directly through the heart.   
  
The guards had been given instructions. As soon as the gun went off, Jack found himself freed. Jack ran to Ianto, kicked the chair out from under him and caught him in his arms.   
  
The blood was pumping quite freely from his breast. “Ianto! Ianto, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Don’t. Oh, God, don’t!” But Ianto couldn’t help it, now. His heart’s blood pulsed onto the floor, and his eyes fixed on Jack. “PLEASE, don’t!” Jack pressed his lips to Ianto’s dying mouth. “I love you,” Jack whispered. He had no way of knowing if it was too late. Ianto’s eyes stared unseeing into nothing.   
  
“You know what’s funny?” the Master’s voice echoed cruelly through the room. “That cyberunit doesn’t work at all. It’s all just lights and buttons.” The door clanged on the Master’s laugher, and Jack was left alone.   
  
He was granted a full twenty-four hours to clutch the ragdoll corpse of his lover. Jack held him until the heat started to leave him, even kissing the dead lips with every throb of his grief, as if he could will just a drop of his immortality into Ianto’s lifeless body. But while his curse might have been enough to scare a Time Lord into following one, easily circumnavigated instruction, it certainly wasn’t enough to turn back death. 


	9. Chapter 9

  
  
“The Master tortured me in front of you, and told you if you wanted to end it to kill yourself,” Jack said at last. “You finally broke.” Jack didn’t say what it was that broke him.  
  
Ianto gulped. Actually, it made sense. He wasn’t sure how long he could sit back and watch the torture of someone he.... “Did it stop?” he asked.   
  
“What?”   
  
“Did he stop torturing you?”   
  
“Physically... yes.”   
  
“At least I did something.”   
  
Jack snorted bleakly. “Something,” he whispered.   
  
Ianto’s heart felt like it was breaking. The amount of pain that Jack had gone through seemed to bleed over onto Ianto, until he could feel it. It hurt even to think about it. Knowing that Jack was hurt — HURT.   
  
Ianto had felt that before. He knew exactly what he was feeling. The crystal vase twinkled in the sunlight, like a blade. “We have another chance,” he whispered.   
  
Jack closed his eyes. “Yes,” he whispered. “Thank God.” And the Doctor. And Martha Jones. Just thank you.   
  
Ianto was frightened. It was over. It was real. Everything had happened. No more lies, not even to himself. “I love you,” he whispered.   
  
The response was not exactly what Ianto had expected. Jack smiled and kissed his hair. “I know,” he whispered. “I’ve known it from the start. From the time you came back to me, after that trip to the country. There was no reason for you to lie to me then, not even with your body.” Ianto looked up at him. Jack smirked, but it was gentle. “This has been so strange for you since the beginning,” he said. “If you didn’t love me, you’d never have let yourself touch me.”   
  
Ianto looked up at him, and his arrogant half-joking little speech. “I’ll bet I told you,” Ianto said.   
  
Jack pressed his lips to Ianto’s hair. “You’ve told me in so many ways,” he said. He squeezed him gently. “I love you, too.”   
  
That was it, then. The two of them lay entwined together on Ianto’s bed. Lifetimes of pain pressed down on them, weighing them down, pushing them to each other. What they had together was tempestuous, confusing, complicated, elusive, painful and wonderful. But whatever it was, it was real. 


End file.
